The Lord Chancellor

Abstract

The most eminent person to sit on the Appellate Committee is the Lord Chancellor. But the Lord Chancellor is more than an ex officio member of the Appellate Committee. He is the head of the judiciary in England and Wales. He is a senior member of Cabinet. And he is the Speaker of the House of Lords. In short he stands in a unique position at the meeting-point of the judicial, executive and legislative branches of government. The present individual appointed to perform all of these tasks is Lord Irvine of Lairg. He is the 234th person to have been Lord Chancellor since the Norman invasion. At the beginning of 1998 he became a household name to many people in Britain as the member of government who was allegedly spending somewhere in the region of £300 of taxpayers’ money on each and every roll of wallpaper that he was using to decorate his official residence inside the Palace of Westminster. It is unfortunate for Lord Irvine that while the great majority of ordinary British people might not be entirely aware of his unique constitutional status as the only public office-holder with a foot in the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government, they are acutely aware of the price of a roll of wallpaper – and at an alleged £300 a go this Lord Chancellor’s taste in interior decoration seemed a trifle expensive. It seemed so to journalists as well.KeywordsPrime MinisterPolitical LifeLabour PartyConservative PartyGovernment RecordThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.